No, what they're saying is that outlook will open a new windows faster, and send the email itself faster, than Gmail does. What outlook is faster at is returning you to the main window. Gmail sends the mail, then loads the "inbox". Outlook keeps the inbox loaded, and then quese the mail to be sent. is it actually faster? That depends on your system, version of outlook and internet speed/latency.

One important difference from the book-based experience: you don't have to hold it up.
Slashdotters seem to have a tendency of "if I wouldn't use it, nobody would", but not having to hold something up could be a fairly large selling point: No tired arms, no lost / damaged book (no lost investment means they can charge more!), less waste (which means the don't have to charge as much, plus they get in friendly with the green crowd), and if they manage to update the information (somehow), you can update it oand not have an out of date book to get rid of.

We have copyright because the market price for digital art severely misrepresents its demand.

Well, that's blatantly WRONG. we have copyright for a large number of reasons, but I am certain that none of those reasons involves a technology that didn't exist when we acquired copyright laws.
Also, your thoughts seem to stem from the concept that all people (or at least an overwhelming majority) are essentially greedy. That they will put forth the least work (in this case, represented by money+time+effort+risk) that they can to get the result (in this case, a copy of music) that they want.
While I would like to argue that this is untrue, and humans are overwhelmingly good and value-oriented, etc, I can't in good faith say that. I don't believe it.
What i do believe is that people will take the lowest work (money+time+effort+risk) to get the highest gain (music, or anything). If that's (cheap+less than a minute+next to none+none)(currently iTunes, in my mind), that is preferable to (free+2 hours+minimal+low)(torrents) AND preferable to (Expensive+a couple hours to a couple days, depending+some+none).
We are the internet generation. Instant gratification takes too long.

Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @02:56PM
from the raise-plow-blade dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A spate of broken cables has brought disruption for many of the world's Web users in 2008 — and the Med has been at the center of the problems. For political reasons, the Mediterranean Sea is an Internet bottleneck through which the majority of traffic between Europe and Asia is squeezed. That traffic must run the gauntlet of earthquakes and heavy maritime traffic to reach its destination. Better and stronger cables are urgently needed to avoid a re-occurrence of the 2008 outages."